Every now and then I feel I should say something.

07/27/2010 09:15 PM

This talk by Chris Watson was my highlight of Port Eliot Festival this year.

Imagine yourself in a remarkably large, very dark, circular room, say 25ft diameter - there are around 30 people on chairs and the floor, a laptop, a surround sound set of 8 speakers, and a really rather garish mural (though it was very dark).

The artist, Chris Watson, then takes ten minutes to lovingly and mellifluously recount how he came to record the 18 hours of bird song you are about to hear from around the estate over 5 days, carefully edited and layered it into a 42 minute audio journey and explains the technology behind the soundscape. He guides you through the journey like a buddhist preparing you for mediation: a visit to the pheasants in their pens on the estate, down to the mud flats and the popping mud, "and then, amazingly, it rained!" and the lightest raindrops echo in counterpoint to the popping mudflats. Under the aggressive tidal waters of the bay and out into low-tide at midnight with only the owls and the foxes and the achingly beautiful groans of the oaks in the dead of night, and then, inexorably we emerge into the incredible cacophony and social jamboree of the dawn chorus, with it's many characters and voices.

then you sit in the dark and listen to that happen and it was the most exquisite 42 minutes. It was extraordinary.

Then a rather odd thing happened. the next day I woke in a tent, in a field in Cornwall and I heard the birds. It was like I was hearing something for the very first time. (it was our third day). And it was just as beautiful - even though I don't really care for birds.

So that's nice. But it's not quite everything - the (very quick and rather clumsy) takeaway for me is that it wasn't just that birdsong is beautiful. It was that what Chris does, like all artists, is to take something we look at everyday and turn it sideways so that we look at it fresh. And it is by forcing us to turn off the filters that we use that we see things anew. And I think we should try and do that with everything we do. Just turn it sideways and make it magical. Make us adjust our media filters... and then, maybe, just maybe, in this world of noise and drama, the next time people might actually hear you.
Just for a moment.

Anyway...

More about Chris from the Port Eliot website:

Hailed as “the David Attenborourgh of radio” and creator of Port Eliot’s much-loved Nature Disco, award-winning sound artist Chris Watson is working on a special event for this year’s festival. Fresh off the plane from the North Pole, where he was working on the BBC’s Frozen Planet (to be broadcast in 2011), Chris came to Port Eliot in May to record for a unique new sound installation – ‘Dusk Until Dawn – A Soundscape around Port Eliot’ – which he’ll be presenting in the Round Room. Watch this short video to find out more:

Chris Watson recording at Port Eliot from Port Eliot Festival on Vimeo.

07/05/2010 05:17 PM
[Slightly less insane version of an earlier post]
Start from the principle that data are trivial. They don't mean anything on their own. Even as complex sets. They need to be parsed. To be valued, filtered, extrapolated, translated, visualised.
Some other starting points:
The world is full of data and they are non-specific.
To each person a particular set of data has different values.
To each person most datasets are trivial.
Datasets can be fiscal, emotional, political, artistic...
Values can be tangible or intangible.
Media channels are multiplying.
Streams are infinite and mutable.
Identity is fragmenting & converging.
Data is physical, meta, and imaginary.
The individual has no choice but to filter and prioritise.
In other words: how do we choose what to watch?

I don't care about Iran's nuclear secrets.
I do care about Lady Gaga's shoes.
Most people don't care about the Google Book Agreement
But Michael Jackson's death was equivalent to a DoS attack on Google News.
I do care that it's raining, but not if it's not raining here.
Which of these is the most "valuable"? How do we filter and unconsciously make that decision? How does anyone prioritise and value one dataset over another?
Can society assign value when overwhelmed with information? What happens tomorrow when every channel is saturated contextually, in real-time - like a simulated bout of schizophrenia?
Are we going to be all right?

05/26/2010 10:40 AM
I had a week in hospital recently which was interesting and gave me a lot of time to fill.
Amongst other things (such as learning to solve a Rubik's Cube on YouTube) I made a collection of psuedo-art-pastiches taken with my phone (Nexus One)... some more pastiche than others.

Anyway - I thought I'd share it:
05/20/2010 10:36 PM

Decided I was feeling well enough to go to a talk last night by Edward Tufte - God of information design. (like I was going to miss that...)

Needless to say it was fairly awesome. Enough for me to tell you it's available online.

Honestly if you ever design anything with data i.e. content i.e. anything - it's worth watching this long but incredibly thought-provoking man. He makes his insights just as relevant to web-pages and slides and art as to data-vis. or statistical analysis.

Here are my take-aways
6 principles of evidence:
  1. Compare. Nothing is visible without contrast
  2. Causality & Mechanics. Aim to describe how or why it went from A to B as well as the fact of going from A to B.
  3. Use multidata sets - data works best when it is contextualised by other data sets - i.e. allows comparison & causality
  4. Tell a story - when the content becomes secondary to the form all is lost.
  5. Integrate - all is content - pictures and words only got separated at Gutenburg (necessarily by process). Humans will always try and integrate words and pictures.
  6. Be credible. Document every source.

More generally:
  • Put it on the same page. Non-adjacent content is non-comparable (example ppt)
  • Humans are good at deciphering. NYTimes homepage has 400 links and still gets 10m daily users
  • Web sites which Pitch have the ethics of the marketplace not the validity of websites that inform.
  • Put content over process. Don't just do/use what is easiest/you know/you're told to. Do what is right for the data,
  • Don't cherry pick - data only has validity when it has integrity.
  • Only drug-dealers and web designers call their customers users
If you're interested I found some proper, fleshed out notes here by Mia Ridge
and some sweet sketch notes by someone called Lucy : http://twitpic.com/1p7h00
05/03/2010 06:07 PM
Who to vote for?! Such a dilemma, especially as this UK election is dominated by the personalities of the leaders of the three main parties - who are in turn: dour, smug and eager.
Basically no one wants to vote for any of them - but someone has to be in charge.

Of course we don't get to vote for that person. That is out of my hands. I get to vote for someone from a group of people that I simply don't know at all.

It got me thinking about the bit where you put the X next to the name - who is that?
For this election I decided to research my own local candidates and decide to vote for the one that would represent me best in Parliament rather than for the national party.

Turns out (thank you theyworkforyou.com) that my local MP actually voted exactly as I'd have liked her to in the past parliament. Whereas the others keep telling me about their personal histories rather than how they would have voted on the same issues.

So I've decided that however much I may despise her party and all it stands for - I completely agree with her.

Surely there must be a site that does this? Asks all my candidates how they would have voted on recent debates and only accepts Yes, No or Abstain? That's how I want to decide. Data!

boho geek blog